Poetry uncovered, Fiction you never saw, All new writing delivered, Courtesy WINTER: 2019/2020 reading thread

I've started reading Maria Edgeworth's CASTLE RACKRENT.

I had better not read too many books at once.

VERTIGO precedes THE IMMIGRANTS.

You are right, of course.

Except for some reason I wrote THE IMMIGRANTS instead of the correct title: THE EMIGRANTS.

In descending order:

Austerlitz
The Emigrants
The Rings of Saturn
Vertigo

They're all good, though.`

I echo Alfred's list. Austerlitz is extraordinary but, given the emotional weight of it, I don't know that I could read it again.

I'm in that delicious/enervating phase of being between books and not knowing what the hell to read.

In anticipation of a trip to the southwestern US next May I've started reading the sensationally named Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West, Hampton Sides.

So far, it is a competent narrative history aimed at a popular audience. The style is workmanlike and just readable enough not to be irritating. Although it is copyright 2006 and the author attempts to embrace some of the Native American side of the story, he has already managed to use the word "squaw" several times, which tends to cast some shade on his credentials in that regard.

xpost Thanks yall---I'll probably start with Austerlitz, although I certainly sympathize with any book or author tagged, fairly or not, as meandering.
I read a book first publised in 2019, by an actual youngperson! Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror---Reflections on Self Delusion. At thirty, she looks back to her Canadian-Filipina origins, with prodigious parents who got religion in Toronto, and vaulted to a megachurch lifestyle complex, which the author and her friends referred to as "The Repentagon," somewhere in the "fathomless sprawl" of Houston--which had no zoning laws, so it was near a teen club dedicated to the music and memory of DJ Screw---and as a young and restless, yet well-schooled teen, she found the szzyrup experience compatible with her ideal of eternity---later sought in the desert, while doing psychotrophics---which might have something to do with her attraction to the writings of Simone Weil, the Christian mystic who escaped to WWII London yet starved herself to death in solidarity with the victims of Hitler (since this book came out, JT's New Yorker archive has incl. illuminating, disturbing examination of what had seemed to me something of a mystery trend: millenials posting "just kill me now, blow me away," in ecstatic context).
Back to life: her storytelling essays may have been strengthened by actual journalism, which she first practiced while going back to her alma mater, the University of Virginia, in the wake of the Rolling Stone debacle. She immediately recognizes and sharpens her view of shady nuances, while meeting people close and closer to the center of the recent furor.
Also rides the rapids through tunnel of mirrors, "The 'I' in Internet," seeking to make sense of some involvements, to get perspective on others that make all too much sense, or seem to (Russian nested doll tendencies of some psychedelic and even weed experiences, splitting difference between self-awareness and self-consciousness, may also apply). And she works hard to make the money required for the good food and exercise (esp. a mostly female-inhabited hivetivity known as the barre, which might have come from an unholy collaboration of Ballard and Atwood) required to make the money for
Oh well, she's got a good acerbic sense of humor about all this. Also a lot of good stuff about her favorite children's books, and discussions of seemingly familiar voices---Weil, Plath, Ferrante, several others--while pointing out things I hadn't thought of and didn't know.
The only section I have doubts about is "The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams," mainly because Trump upstages everybody.

Suddenly came to the end of teh Mike Heron memoir part of You Know What You Could Be.
Just getting heavily into it when it abruptly ended. So hope there might be some hope that he writes a longer memoir at some point.
Has Robin Williamson written a memoir?
Heron gets as far as Robin and Licorice getting back from Morocco which means the psychedelic era of th eband is just about to get underway.

Hertoic Failure by Fintan O'Toole
the book on Brexit which came out last year and i started before Xmas and thought I was going to get read over Xmas.
INteresting stuff, he's exploring the meaning of the title subject. He's just been talking about the Terror being found in 2016 and the mission it was on to find the NOrthwest passage. Followed by a load of people going off to try to find the lost ship and not being thought to be really doing it if they came back without finding the ship, including somebody who found the entrance to teh Northwest passage which i thought was mythical. INteresting book, may need to read some more of him once I get through this. Wish I'd gotten myself together to get a ticket to watch him talking at the local university when he was here last year or the year before.

Sex, Drugs and Rock'n'roll: The Science of Hedonism Zoe Cormier
Popular science book on the pleasure principle and evolution and stuff.
Bought this is n a charity shop a while back and its been sitting in a pile waiting to be read.

I finished The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen, slowed a bit by my suffering from a miserable cold, which turned out to be strep. It's not a super-easy book to read, bearing as it does a number of modernist hallmarks - acute attention to psychological states, unusual formal structure, lack of omniscient perspective. On the other hand, it does tell a coherent, emotionally-resonant tale, the shape of which becomes clear at around the 3/4 point, and is resolutely realist, keeping flights of lyrical fancy to a minimum. When the shape of the plot first becomes apparent, it may seem perhaps a tad old-fashioned, Gothic even, but by the end, its necessity to the careful and intricate structure becomes plain. Dealing as it does with gradations of social respectability and expected behavior which have now been nearly erased by the march of 20th-century progress towards the fully-liberated consumer, and limning as it does a particularly genteel level of that society, at the rare slow moment, one may catch a whiff of the dusty and fusty. Nonetheless the acuteness of the portraits, especially of the children, and the current of mordant humor running just below the surface, together with the overall craftsmanship and frequently glittering sentences, make it hard to assign any grade other than "masterpiece".

I've now started the enjoyably diverting (and undemanding) Life is Meals by James and Kay Salter.

I discovered Bowen in December '18. "Gothic" is a good descriptor. If you liked what you read, try The Death of the Heart.

I'd like to read that one at some point.

Also try doorstop Collected Stories, from the very early 20s (and maybe before?) to late 60s.

a person of interest, susan choi

ive been reading mickelsons ghosts by john gardner ~ p good, reads vaguely like a less depraved sabbath's theater to me

The Lark Ascending, Richard King. Enjoyed Original Rockers quite a lot so looking forward.

Just now coming to this thread -- I read Reinhardt's Garden last year and loved it! I'm a few months removed so my impressions are no longer the freshest; but I read it around the same time I tried to read a Bernhard I'd never read before (Old Masters), and I thought Haber was doing something quite different and, in a way, much more straightforwardly enjoyable, once you get past the intimidating look of the unbroken word-column, and the basic conceit of the delirious monologue. I thought the transitions between the narrative present and recollected events were managed very well, and kept me interested in a way that Bernhard sometimes fails to do. (Not that he doesn't hold my interest [Well, Old Masters didn't; apart from that, though...], but with TB I tend to feel I'm being asked to focus more on the language itself, and less on the story.)

Yeah, I really liked Reinhardt's Garden.

I've started reading Maria Edgeworth's CASTLE RACKRENT.

How can one read James Joyce — or Beckett for that matter — without a sound appreciation of Castle Rackrent?"

-- Brian Aldiss, "Diagrams for Three Enigmatic Stories"

Castle Rackrent is a perfect little black comedy.

i finished parable of the sower over the holiday and i'm just blown away. i can't stop thinking about it. of course i'll be picking up the second in the series and everything else butler wrote, but if anyone has any other suggestions in this vein i'd really appreciate them: prescient books that deal with the disaster of now, that understand social reality outside protected bubbles and point ways forward, from queer povs a bonus.

As someone who also read Parable for the first time recently, I'd be curious to hear whether you found anything that fits the bill.

I'm tempted to recommend Omar Al-Akkad's American War, which gave me similar feelings, but was less well-written (What isn't less well-written than Octavia Butler, though?!), to the point where it stopped holding my interest around the halfway mark. Been meaning to pick it back up though!

Deep into that Barr book on Ealing - curious how even as far back as the 70's, someone mounting a defense of the studio had to put the spotlight on its "rebels" (Hamer, McKendrick) and push back against its archetypal image - "x isn't just what you thought it was" admitidley being a well-worn approach to talking about anything.

I like Brian Aldiss, and like people to read old books, but I don't really understand his question above.

I don't see very much relation between this and Joyce, or Beckett. I do see a bit of a relation with Myles na gCopaleen - the parodic Editor and footnotes anticipating AN BEAL BOCHT / THE POOR MOUTH.

Though my understanding of most things is very limited indeed, I suspect that I actually know Joyce, at least ULYSSES, better than Aldiss did.

Just reading some batches of short novels:

Linda Bostrom Knausgard - The Helios Disaster
Thomas Benhard - On the Mountain
Peter Handke - The Afternoon of a Writer
Franz Kafka - Letter to his Father
Anna Kavan - Sleep has his House
Natalia Ginzburg - Happiness, as Such

finished THE REVISIONARIES by a.r. moxon, which . . . not even sure what to say. enormous, rambling, meta. i quite liked it, and it easily kept me going through 600 pages, but i don't think i'd dare *recommend* it

it shares that distinction, among other things, with infinite jest

Finished part 1 of Bros K. The story so far: everyone is screaming.

Thanks to this thread, I checked out Thomas Benhard's Old Masters.

Finished CASTLE RACKRENT, plus Preface, Glossary, Notes, Appendix, Introduction, Note on the Text.

The Glossary is probably the highlight of all these: classic Irish fun, though the 1995 Introduction fancifully describes it as a patriarchal strategy of containment written by Edgeworth's father. The Introduction goes too wildly off-beam in those directions but does make a fair case for understanding the importance of the novel as a kind of allegory of the fate of the Anglo-Irish.

Started reading the copy of Crime and Punishment I bought a couple of years ago thinking I'd try something ther than constance garnet.
Enjoying it so far but have a few other things i want to read.

Castle Rackrent is a wild ride though I remember it now more for its form and innovations than the weight of its ideas.

What are the innovations?

That quotation is from a short story by Aldiss. Earth is being colonized by friendly aliens who are obsessed with minor 19th century writers. These aliens have psychic powers, and use them to force their literary tastes onto the culture and retroactively bring into existence more 19th century works, just as minor.

Sounds remarkable! So I suppose we weren't to take the quotation literally after all; perhaps the opposite.

I've put my Egan novel on the back burner and started on a novel I bought years ago: Zadie Smith's NW.

I've never got to it but every time I've flicked through it the text has looked impressive and innovative.

First two pages and it feels like the real deal.

I finished Blood and Thunder. It was well-researched in the way that is possible through books and manuscripts. Some attempt was made to reflect the perspective of the various tribes of Native Americans involved, but since that perspective is very meagerly represented in the written record, it was meagerly represented in this book, too. I missed it.

The thing this book did best was to give a sense of Carson as a highly unusual product of his age and experiences. To give one example of what I mean, he was a 'mountain man' and trapper in his youth, but a sober one. In an age obsessed by "Christian duty" he was apparently motivated far more by his sense of fairness, loyalty and justice than any conception of duty, Christian or otherwise.

I came to like him. Apparently, everyone who knew him did, too.

As someone who also read Parable for the first time recently, I'd be curious to hear whether you found anything that fits the bill.

I'm tempted to recommend Omar Al-Akkad's American War, which gave me similar feelings, but was less well-written (What isn't less well-written than Octavia Butler, though?!), to the point where it stopped holding my interest around the halfway mark. Been meaning to pick it back up though!

― handsome boy modelling software (bernard snowy), Friday, January 24, 2020 1:55 AM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

well, i picked up more butler and it's doing the trick! parable of the talents and bloodchild.

barnes and noble of all places had nice hardcovers of the two parables

I just read Bloodchild, been wanting to read the Parable books but Butler books just don't turn up at used bookstores around here (I got Bloodchild at B&N, actually)... "Amnesty" and "Speech Sounds" are amaaaaazing.

xxposts - i have Blood & Thunder in my stack of “to-reads” bc it looked interesting- will def check it out based on your review, Aimless!

About 2/3 of the way through Mrs Palfrey and - aside from Taylor's mastery of the subtle detail and the light she throws on the tiny hollows of misery that colour our days - the thing that's really struck me is how much she loathes writers, or, at the very least, what the process of writing does to writers (which I suppose amounts to the same thing). Ludo is pretty rancid, Beth from A View of the Harbour is in perpetual torment thanks to her writing and Angel. Well, Angel.

The writer in Angel is so damn exuberant though. I can't dislike her.

Ach, I dunno. Exuberance is good but without an ounce of insight?

i’m not sure ludo is entirely rancid is he? iirc kingsley amis said it was an unusual portrait of a writer in fiction who is actually seen to do the work of writing. certainly he finds Mrs Palfrey picturesque or interesting subject matter.

agree with Alfred on Angel, she’s incredibly present and vivid - bursts off the page in her awkwardness and will.

both remarkable books. might have to revisit mrs palfrey.

I'm probably being a bit unfair to Ludo (I've not finished - he might turn out to save her from a rampaging bear). I get his loneliness lends him a kind of searchlight quality, sweeping for any sort of contact, but it's his relation to Mrs Palfrey, which is kind of vampiric: she becomes purely about material or sustenance for his habit. And his writerly eye is beautifully rendered (that thirst for detail) but it's still grubby as hell.

yes i think that’s fair. the whole novel is pretty unsparing of people and of time.

the thing that's really struck me is how much she loathes writers, or, at the very least, what the process of writing does to writers

I mean, she WAS friends with Kingsley Amis, so fair enough.

Haha - very true!

Well, I was totally wrong about Ludo. There is quite literally no end to the shit I don't know.

I finished the book in the waiting room of a health centre; I was totally overwhelmed and had to hide my face. What a writer.

I reread parts of Lorrie Moore, A GATE AT THE STAIRS.

And continued with Morris Dickstein's 'The Critic & Society: 1900-1950', on Edmund Wilson et al.

I'm currently reading a recently released NYRB book: Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, Tim Parks. It's an odd duck. Kind of a cross between popular science, popular philosophy, a memoir, and an extended personal essay on the subject of human consciousness. I have yet to decide if he has anything new to say on this subject that is cogent or worthwhile, but his authorial voice is engaging enough to make him companionable, and that is worth much right there, so I read on.

What are the innovations?

― the pinefox, Monday, 27 January 2020 11:18 (four days ago)

As an early historical novel, and the perspective of the narrator

I just started reading Mike McCormack's odd sci-fi novella "Notes from a coma". John McGahern meets PKD!